mortally ill and he never performed it. The original ending has remained the standard one, although recordings of the alternative coda have been released (see "Recordings", below). Reception The critics were divided over the merits of the concerto after the premiere. A reviewer in Boston wrote that the piece was "fine, warm and melodious", although more a rhapsody than a concerto. The critic thought the work superbly constructed, but old-fashioned: "what dissonance there is would not alarm an elderly aunt". The same view was taken by Peter Heyworth in The Observer after the British premiere; he wrote that there was little in the work that would have startled an audience in the year that the Titanic met its iceberg. Even though Heyworth thought the concerto showed a marked "stagnation" in Walton's recent music, he praised the "singularly lovely epilogue, whose hushed, tranquil air seems to capture a vista of a calm sea spreading out into the night". The reviewer in The Manchester Guardian called the work "a modern masterpiece" showing the composer at his freshest and most inspired, substituting for the melancholy of Walton's "great concertos of the thirties" "something more serene". The Times, considering the Cello Concerto along with the earlier concertos, remarked that Walton was not a progressive composer but each of his works was stamped with his musical personality –"wit, coruscating and explosive energy, and a half-wistful, half-contented romantic brooding … the produce of an aristocratic mind." Kennedy writes that although the work is "beautifully written, grateful to play and presents the listener with few problems", it is "too relaxed for its own good", occasionally episodic and inclined to re-use familiar Walton mannerisms. Walton found Piatigorsky's input to the composition valuable and a comfort. When, later, he embarked on writing his Second Symphony he wrote to the cellist, "I miss your sympathetic guidance [and] help to spur me on. For you indeed spurred me on with my concerto which I consider one of my best works". The cellist Daniel Müller-Schott has written that players and listeners can sense in the music "the world of nature … the whole atmosphere of Italy. The golden rays of the sun, the different colours of [Ischia's] light, the blue tones of the sea and the scent of the saltwater can be sensed with rare immediacy. … One can speak of Walton in many ways as an 'English Impressionist' with a unique